Saturday, 11/10/12
We all know that to the second catechism question, “Why did
God make you?” our answer began with, “To know him.” Today we celebrate the feast
of Pope Leo the Great, a man who was most helpful it letting us know God clearly.
We can come to know God through the Gospels and Epistles,
but only if we take all the passages, balancing misleading passages against clearer
ones. By taking up just single passages, and not fitting them in with the Bible’s
total picture, we become like the six blind men of Indonesia who each took hold
of a different part of an elephant.
The blind Indonesian who grabbed the elephant’s tail
announced, “An elephant is very like a snake.” The man holding his ear said he
was like a fan. The blind man colliding with the elephant’s side exclaimed “An
elephant is very like a brick wall.” The blind man grasping a tusk was certain
of himself. “I am sure that an elephant is vey like a spear.”
A well-meaning Father Arius, coming across Jesus saying “The
Father is greater than I” concluded that Jesus was not divine. Manichaeus, a
Persian wise man, on reading Paul’s words “I see in my members another
principle at war with the law of my mind,” concluded that we have a second evil
creator whom we must serve with sinful indulgences. Eutychius, Patriarch of
Alexandria, concluded that Jesus had no separate human nature. Nestorius, Archbishop
of Constantinople, from his reading
concluded that Jesus was two separate persons, one human, one divine.
Unlike them, Leo came into adulthood after a wide-ranging
submersion in all the Scriptures. His even-handed approach to controversies
gave rise to a most extensive correspondence. When he was in his twenties and
thirties both the pope and the emperor used him as a trouble-shooter to places where
disputes raged. At age forty Leo was an agent for Pope Sixtus’s, settling a
controversy in France. Then, when Sixtus died, all of Rome clamored for Leo to
return to take over the papacy.-
Leo the Great was patient and kind with people with straying
views, but his own rock-hard convictions on the faith gave the Catholic world
complete confidence in him. As well he led the whole Catholic Church to
accepting the teaching of his successors in the chair of Peer.
No comments:
Post a Comment